Frank McCourt Quotes
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We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.
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I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.
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I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.
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Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for.
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You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.
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My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalogue number, that's all.
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They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them.
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I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
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Ireland, once you live there, you're seduced by it.
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I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.
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When I came to America, I dreamed bigger dreams.
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I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.
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Scatter my ashes on the Shannon.
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I asked my dad what afflicted meant and he said 'Sickness son, and things that don't fit.'
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I was ashamed of it, of the poverty I came from.
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It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.
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I can do no more than tell the truth.
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Way back in my mid-20s, I started making notes. I would just jot things down: lists of street names, songs, peculiar turns of speech, jokes, whatever.